


(your mess is) mine

by singsongsung



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Post 2x09
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-16 18:15:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13059456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: On Boxing Day, Jughead’s father wakes him by placing a box on his bed.“Pack up,” FP says gruffly before Jughead is even truly awake. “You’re moving across town.”-In which FP Jones drops his son off on the doorstep of the only person he knows who successfully left the Serpents, and Jughead suddenly finds himself cohabiting with the girl whose heart he broke.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Great big shoutouts to heartunsettledsoul, who inspired this idea, and to sylwrites, who very helpfully talked through all the strange decisions these kids keep making with me. I'm blowing kisses to you both across the internet.

_you're the reason that i feel so strong_  
 _the reason that i'm hanging on_  
 _you know you gave me all the time_  
 _oh, did i give enough of mine?_  
\- vance joy, "mess is mine"

 

 

On Boxing Day, Jughead’s father wakes him by placing a box on his bed. 

“Pack up,” FP says gruffly before Jughead is even truly awake. “You’re moving across town.”

Jughead scrambles out of bed, demanding, “ _What?_ ” as he follows his father out into the living room, but no amount of arguing, no amount of indignation, no amount of yelling or pleading, serves to dissuade FP. He marches back into Jughead’s room and starts tossing clothes haphazardly in the box, and it’s only then, with the sting of tears pricking at his eyes, that Jughead yanks the box away and starts to pack for himself.

“Bring the typewriter,” his father barks over his shoulder as he leaves the room.

 

 

 

Twenty minutes later, they’re in the car, turning off the gravel roads in Sunnyside and heading north.

 

 

 

“Hell no,” Jughead says, or tries to say, when his father pulls up in front of a picture-perfect house with a red front door. His mouth has gone totally dry.

“Out,” is all FP says, and half a second later he’s striding up the walkway, his worn flannel shirt billowing in the brutal wind.

He talks with Alice in the kitchen while Jughead stands awkwardly in the foyer, feeling like a piece of garbage, like something his father thinks is broken beyond repair, like a boy who cannot and will not be fixed. Betty stands near the stairs, leaning against the wall. Her arms are crossed, and her shoulders are hitched up a little higher than usual, like her body is primed for a fight. She wears an off-white t-shirt and a pair of pink pyjama pants. Between them, half an inch of her skin is visible. Jughead can’t look at that strip of skin without feeling like he’s going to crumple to the floor. 

In the kitchen, his father raises his voice, but his tone is soft in its desperation when he says, “Please, Ally.”

_Ally?_ Jughead wonders, and he knows Betty is thinking the same thing from the way she straightens, her brows knitting together. She looks at him and opens her mouth and -

She closes it again. 

 

 

 

He’s given Polly’s room. Much like Betty’s, it’s very pink. There are fewer books and a ridiculous number of headbands. There’s a picture tucked into the vanity mirror that features Polly and Cheryl Blossom smiling widely in their cheerleading uniforms, and he knows right away that he’ll have to take it down in order to sleep. 

“Jughead,” Alice says as she fluffs Polly’s pillows for him. “I trust that you know better than to attempt to sneak into any other bedrooms in this house in the middle of the night?”

“Betty and I bro - ” His sentence dies at the sight of her raised eyebrow. “Yes,” he says simply.

“And I - ” Alice straightens, the bed finally made to her satisfaction. She runs a hand over the duvet, smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle, not quite looking at him as she says, “I hope you know that your father cares about you very much. And that this is his way of showing it.” 

“It seems like a shit way, Mrs. Cooper,” he sighs before he can help himself, and then quickly mumbles, “Sorry.” 

Her eyes find his, and in a startlingly gentle tone, she tells him, “It almost always is.”

 

 

 

After a day spent restlessly sleeping followed by a night that features much of the same, he runs into Betty in the washroom that divides her bedroom from her sister’s. She says, “Go ahead,” and vanishes behind a closed door before he can even say good morning.

They eat breakfast on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Betty eats her Cheerios so slowly that the last few bites look soggy. 

“I’m sorry about this,” he tells her lowly, sure that her mother hasn’t gone far. 

She looks up at him with those guileless green eyes of hers. The light coming in through the kitchen windows turns her hair to white gold. “I’m not,” she says, and his stomach twists with some kind of skittish hope, but then she adds, “I worried for you.”

He remembers that outfit of hers - pink skirt, blue shirt, classic Betty Cooper - and what she’d revealed underneath to a bar full of Serpents, black silk and lace against skin that looked pale and delicate beneath harsh lights, the twist of her hips, the arch of her back.

(He is not turned on by the memory. _He is not turned on by the memory._ )

Betty grabs his bowl and takes it to the sink. 

“Thank you,” he tells her, as she walks away. 

“No problem,” she says softly.

Jughead can’t find the words to tell her that he meant so much more than the dishes. 

 

 

 

“I can show you where the controllers and everything are for the TV downstairs,” Betty offers when they find themselves hovering in the foyer once again. She twists her fingers into the hem of her t-shirt; Jughead can’t get a good look at her palms. “The Netflix account is hooked up to it.” 

“That’s okay,” he says. “I have my laptop, and I… know the wifi password.” 

Betty nods, and attempts to flash him one of those patented Cooper smiles, but it doesn’t even really make its way into her cheeks, never mind to her eyes. With nothing else to say, she jogs up the stairs. Jughead follows her at the much slower pace, staring at his feet. He’s halfway up when he hears the sound of her door closing. 

 

 

 

He retreats into Polly’s room for lack of anything else to do, leaving his door open just a crack so as not to look like a totally reclusive house guest. He has no idea what the plan is - FP said something about staying with the Coopers until he got his head on straight, but some days ago, his father had also angrily suggested that he move in with Betty’s family, or Archie’s, seemingly so that he’d be out of the South side, and FP’s Serpent business, for the foreseeable future. It seems equally possible that he’ll be here for two weeks, or that he’ll still be here on the day Betty stands on the football field behind Riverdale High, plucks a cap off her sunny blonde hair, and tosses it into the air. Both of these potential futures are terrifying in their own ways, but he thinks he’d rather return to a place where nearly everyone seemed to have a knife on their person at all times than spend the next two and a half years going to sleep every night with his ex-girlfriend mere feet away, separated from him by two thin walls. 

Jughead lays on the bed and stares at the ceiling for the better part of an hour, and then he gets up, retrieves the box that contains his typewriter, and sets it on Polly’s pristine white desk. The house is almost eerily quiet, so after he loads the typewriter with paper (which Betty, being Betty, thoughtfully included with the gift), he plugs his headphones into his phone and selects a playlist.

The messaging app on his phone displays a little red bubble with the number fourteen in it - texts he’s missed, texts he hasn’t even read yet. He saw glimpses of the names of their senders when he first picked up his phone: Toni, Sweet Pea, an unknown number or two. He doesn’t bother to look at them. The question they’ll ask ( _where the fuck are you?_ ) does not have a believable answer. 

He sets his hands on the typewriter and lets them linger there for a moment, brushing over letters, before he slowly presses down on a key. The sound the typewriter makes is comforting in its utter predictability, and Jughead sinks into it, forming words and then sentences. 

 

 

 

Hours later, when the sky is getting dark outside Polly Cooper’s streak-free windows, Jughead gets the sense that he’s being watched. He turns and sees Betty standing in the doorway that separates Polly’s room from the washroom. She’s wearing a fluffy lilac bathrobe, clutching it closed at the neck. Her ponytail is drooping, strands of hair falling free, and there’s a smudge of grease against her hairline. 

“Betty,” he says. He takes off his headphones. 

Her gaze drifts from his face to the typewriter and back again. “I’m glad you’re using it,” she says, in that soft voice of hers, the one that never fails to hurt. 

He nods and tells her, sincerely, “I love it, Betts.”

There’s a twitch to her eyes when he calls her that, like he’s done something cruel. Her fingers curl more tightly into her robe, so that not even a hint of her collarbone is visible to him. “I’m glad,” she whispers as she closes the door. 

Jughead hears the click of the lock. He closes his eyes for a few seconds and then puts his headphones back on, turning up the volume of the music so that he won’t have to hear the steady pattern of water drumming against the bottom of the tub be interrupted by the shape and movement of her body. 

 

 

 

Dinner is an awkward affair. Hal, like Betty, appears freshly showered, and Jughead surmises that they were working on some kind of project in the garage together. He seems irritated by the presence of his daughter’s gang member ex-boyfriend in his home, and Jughead can’t exactly blame him for that, especially not when he himself is still wondering what the deal is with his father and Betty’s mom, and why she was so willing to take in a teenager she, by all accounts, had never liked. 

He doesn’t really know much about Betty’s father, aside from the fact that he tried to convince Polly to get an abortion without telling his wife, that he almost always otherwise follows Alice’s lead, and that he taught his youngest child, who grew up in pink dresses and frilly socks, looking every bit like a doll come to life, a hefty amount of mechanical knowledge. Jughead suspects that this was the best thing Hal Cooper ever did for either of his children; across the table, despite the way she’s poking at her sliced carrots, Betty’s shoulders are soft and relaxed. It occurs to Jughead abruptly that Fangs would’ve loved to talk her ear off about the bike he was repairing, if Jughead had ever allowed them to meet. He’s not sure what to make of that thought - it unsettles him, stealing his appetite away for a moment. 

“Will you be returning to Riverdale High for the winter term?” Hal asks, clutching his steak knife a bit more aggressively than necessary as he regards Jughead. 

He opens his mouth to say that he doesn’t know, but Alice speaks first. 

“Of course he will, Hal,” she says in the dismissive tone she so often uses when speaking to her husband. “It only makes sense.” She looks at Betty, and her lips tilt in a way that could almost be construed as a smile. “Won’t that be nice, dear?” 

Betty’s eyebrows lift a little, confusion clear on every plane of her face. She looks right over at Jughead, her baffled eyes meeting his. 

He shrugs. Betty sneaks a glance over at her mother, like she’s waiting for the punchline. 

It never comes.

 

 

 

Jughead walks into the bathroom while Betty’s brushing her teeth; she hadn’t bothered closing the door that opens into Polly’s room all the way. He says, “Sorry,” immediately, but she gives her head a little shake and steps to the side, making room for him at the sink. 

He extracts his toothbrush from the little ziploc bag he shoved it in on the way out of the trailer. Betty takes her tube of toothpaste out of the cup on the counter and hands it to him. 

“Thanks,” he says. He squeezes some toothpaste onto his brush, caps it again and returns it to the cup, and then runs his brush under the water briefly. He puts his toothbrush in his mouth, and Betty leans down to spit, using her left hand to hold her hair out of her face. 

They face the mirror together, brushing their teeth, in some kind of parody of the domestic future he denied them when he walked away from her reaching hands. Betty’s not wearing a bra, her nipples faint pink peaks beneath her white t-shirt. She smells like almonds. Her hair is in two neat braids that fall against her shoulders. Jughead catalogues these details as if he’s going to write them down, but he won’t. There have always been things about Betty that were too precious to lay out in black and white, that could never truly be conjured by paper and ink. 

Betty finishes brushing her teeth first and washes her face with a grapefruit-scented scrub. When she lifts her face after rinsing it, the droplets of water clinging to her eyelashes remind him of the last time he made her cry. She presses a towel to her face, and they disappear. 

Jughead’s still brushing his teeth, has been brushing them for long enough now that one spot on his gums is starting to hurt, but he doesn’t want to stop, because stopping means leaving this room, and this moment, and her. 

Betty hangs up her damp towel and says, “Jughead.” 

He turns to her so quickly that it might’ve been comedic, under any other circumstances. Toothpaste foams out of one corner of his mouth. 

She takes a breath, one that he can see in the rise of her chest, before she says, “Thank you. For the book. It - ” She bites into her bottom lip. “It was my best gift this Christmas.” 

Jughead wants to say _you’re welcome_ , but he has to spit out his mouthful of toothpaste first. When he straightens, Betty’s already inched toward the door that leads into her room. 

“You can put your toothbrush in there,” she says, pointing to the cup that holds her own. She slips out of the bathroom, the end of one of her braids the last thing he sees. 

He puts his toothbrush into the cup slowly, carefully. He makes sure that it doesn’t touch hers. 

 

 

 

In bed, he looks at his phone. There are no new message notifications, and in the upper lefthand corner, two tiny words, _No Service_ , have appeared.

The Serpents were paying his phone bills. He guesses they aren’t anymore. 

 

 

 

Sometime late in the night, Jughead is torn from sleep by a cry of “ _please_ ” that sounds like it’s been ripped from a nightmare. He sits up in bed, disoriented, his heart beginning to race, and then he hears, “No, no, please - ”

His mind finally focuses, and he remembers where he is. He recognizes the panicked voice. 

_Betty._

He throws back the floral sheets on Polly’s bed and stumbles through the room in the dark, rushing through the bathroom and into Betty’s bedroom. As his vision adjusts, he sees that she’s tangled in her bedsheets, curled into a ball, one arm extended outward, fingers splayed and stiff as she whimpers quiet pleas. 

“Betty,” he breathes. He grabs her hand with one of his own, and uses the other to give her shoulder a shake as he sits on the edge of her bed. “Betty, wake up, you’re dreaming - ”

She gasps sharply and bolts upright, her tense fingers curling around his hand, her eyes wild. 

“It was a dream,” he murmurs, staring at her worriedly. Her braids have loosened, and he pushes a few stray tendrils of hair off of her clammy cheeks. “You’re okay.” 

She sobs abruptly, her eyes filling with tears in one instant and overflowing the next. “Juggie,” she says in a small, choked voice. She pulls her hand out of his and touches both hands to his shoulders, his biceps, his chest, like she can’t believe he’s real. “You’re here,” she says, big tears sliding down her skin and dripping off her chin, onto her blankets. 

“Yeah,” he says, gathering her to him. He puts a hand to the back of her head, bringing her face against his shoulder. Betty’s arms come around him, her hands gripping at his old, ripped Metallica t-shirt. “I’m here.” 

Against his shoulder, she releases a sob so heavy that it seems to shake her entire body. “He had you,” she weeps. “He had you and he said he would kill you. I did everything he asked and he - ”

“Shh,” Jughead murmurs, holding her tighter. An ache pulses in his chest and seems to emanate outward. She surrendered parts of herself for him, to keep him safe, more than once, and now, even now, it’s not her own death that haunts her nightmares. 

“Betty,” he murmurs against the side of her head. “Honey, I’m here. I’m right here.” 

Clutching at him, she shakes her head against his shoulder. “You weren’t,” she says, her voice still packed with tears. 

He doesn’t know if she’s talking about her dream or a real moment. It doesn’t matter, really. It’s true either way. 

Jughead holds her so tightly that the muscles in his arms feel strained. He presses a tender kiss into her hair. His lips are trembling. 

 

 

tbc.


	2. Chapter 2

In the smallest hours of the night, Betty tells him about the Black Hood in detail, both hands tucked between her cheek and her pillow. Jughead rests a hand lightly against her hip. 

It’s different than her confession at his father’s trailer. It’s different than the conversation they had with Archie and Veronica in a booth at Pop’s. She gives him every gritty piece of the story, her tears creating a small puddle of wetness on her pillowcase. It is not a pretty sort of crying, her face contorting every now and again as she fights back a sob. She tells him about the sound of the Black Hood’s breath in her ear. She tells him about the nightmares, in which she is always immobile, powerless to stop him. 

Jughead snakes his thumb very carefully beneath her shirt and strokes it softly over her hipbone, which seems even more pronounced than he remembers, the bone sharp beneath her skin. He wonders if she’s lost weight. He can see, very clearly, that the bags beneath her eyes are starting to rival those beneath his own. 

“Jug,” she says on a shuddering breath, her eyes shiny spots of brightness in her dark room, and he wants to tell her that he’ll fix this for her, he’ll fix the world for her, he’ll never let her down again. He wants to say _I love you, Betty_ and watch as she breathes those words in until they loosen something inside of her and the line of her jaw loses some of its tension as her mouth remembers how to smile. 

What he does say is, “He’s gone, Betts. Thanks to you.” 

“I don’t know,” she whispers. A tear runs over the bridge of her nose and slides down her cheek. He makes a shushing sound instinctively, his fingers twitching against her hip as he aches to pull her closer to him, but Betty shakes her head, denying his efforts at comfort. “It was too easy, Jughead. It was all too easy.” 

He watches as she turns her face into her pillow and wonders when they started expecting everything to be hard. 

 

 

 

Jughead doesn’t sleep much, dozing off occasionally only to wake with a start, always a bit disoriented to find Betty’s furniture and Betty’s wallpaper and _Betty_ in front of him. He listens to her slow, deep breaths and tries to make himself into something solid, something reassuring, on the other side of her mattress. 

When the clock on her bedside table shows that it’s just past five, he puts a gentle hand on her shoulder. She shifts, not quite awake, and he remembers her in his trailer, in his bed, in his shirt, curling up tightly against him when her alarm went off, choosing him over everything outside of that bed that demanded their attention. She’s got the same sleepy look about her now, her eyes hooded, her hand lifting and her fingers pressing against his jaw. 

“Early, Juggie,” she says hoarsely. 

He dips his head to press his forehead against hers, revelling in the warmth and softness of her skin for a moment. “I know,” he says. “But I’ve gotta get out of here before your mom wakes up.” 

He can see little flashes of realization in her eyes as the past few days come to the fore of her drowsy mind: the dance, the break-up, the sudden cohabitation, all the ways that things have changed between them. She looks at him like she did in the Whyte Wyrm parking lot, so much hurt in her eyes that her irises go dark with it. She looks at him like she did in the Blue & Gold office, anger shifting slowly into something very tired, something that aches. 

She jerks her chin down in a tiny little nod, drops her hand from his face, and rolls over, pulling the blankets up around herself. Jughead wants to reach out and touch her messy hair and say he’s sorry until he’s breathless, but he doesn’t. 

He goes back into Polly Cooper’s bedroom and sets an alarm for eight so that it won’t seem like he’s catching up on sleep he didn’t get during the night. He pulls the blankets up to his chin, just like Betty did a moment ago in her own bed, and swallows over and over again, until the lump in his throat doesn’t hurt quite so much. 

 

 

 

Once he’s dragged himself out of bed in the morning, he makes his way to the kitchen and pours himself yet another bowl of Cheerios. The box of cereal is set on the table, along with the milk, next to a bowl filled with apples and bananas and oranges; it’s like a scene from the kind of commercials he watched as a child, advertising various cereals as _part of a balanced breakfast_ , showing him images of a table he couldn’t imagine that anyone actually had in their kitchen. 

This is the crux of the problem: Cheerios, one-percent milk, and fruit on a table in a kitchen dappled with sunlight that smells faintly of vanilla and pine needles. This is Betty Cooper’s life; it’s never been his, it will never _be_ his. She is stubborn, this girl he loves so much in spite of himself, who is currently flipping through her mother’s copy of _Good Housekeeping_ at the other end of the table, she says she makes her own choices, and she does, he knows she does - he knows that he is one of them. But it frightens him to think of a man with a snarl on his face and tattoos on his neck closing in on her, and frightens him even more to imagine begging for her forgiveness, wrapping her in his arms, and waking up some morning twenty or thirty years in the future to see her looking at a wobbling kitchen table covered in brown rings from the bottom of coffee mugs, her disappointed expression asking _where is the bowl of fruit, where are the Cheerios, where is the balanced breakfast?_

Betty carries her plate, which is sprinkled with crumbs from toast, over to the sink. She opens a large tin sitting on the counter, one covered in a pattern composed of reindeer and plaid. She sets the tin down in front of him. 

Inside, there are shortbread cookies. Jughead waits until she’s rinsed her plate, put it in the dishwasher, and left the kitchen, and then he promptly eats six of them, the cookies melting in his mouth like Betty used to, her lips going soft and pliant against his as she surrendered herself to his kisses, her arms winding around his neck in a gesture both possessive and trusting. 

 

 

 

After breakfast, Jughead showers, trying very hard not to wonder if Betty is thinking about him the way he thinks about her whenever he hears the shower start, imagining her body bare and wet and sudsy. 

There is no bar soap in the shower, only two bottles of bodywash, and because Jughead’s not about to ask Alice Cooper for money to buy anything, he’s left to choose between a holiday-themed scent called peppermint mocha and a bottle which contains an almond-oil scented bodywash that promises smooth skin. He chooses the latter, and the moment he squeezes some into his hand, visions of Betty start dancing in his head. The smell reminds him of her head against his shoulder in a booth at Pop’s, of his motorcycle helmet on over her hair, of breathing her in before pressing his mouth against the juncture of her jaw and neck. 

Jughead jerks himself off in the shower, his wet hair falling into his face, trying to remain completely silent so that the girl he’s thinking of won’t know what he’s doing. When he’s done with his shower and is dressed in fresh clothes, he goes into the washroom to hang up his towel and then cracks open the door that leads into Betty’s room so that the steam can escape more easily. 

She’s listening to music, he realizes, after he turns the doorknob, a soft song with a melancholy melody. Lana Del Rey, he thinks; one of her favourites. All those songs about open roads and biker bars and destructive relationships - he’d thought, once, that they were strange favourites for all-American Betty Cooper. But his surprise had faded once he’d learned the edges of her, hidden beneath all that soft cotton. 

Sitting at her vanity, an unopened tube of lipstick in her grasp, Betty stares down at her hands, a faraway expression in her eyes. She sings along faintly, her words halfway between speech and song, “It hurts to love you, but I still love you… it’s just the way I feel.” 

Jughead presses his forehead against the back of the door. 

Betty paints her lips slowly, with precision, and then sets the lipstick aside. She considers her reflection, her mouth absently making the shapes of lyrics: “You still can find me, if you ask nicely, underneath the pines.” 

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing a bloody red across her cheek. Jughead steps away from the door. 

 

 

 

He spends the afternoon seated in front of his typewriter, but he doesn’t write anything. Instead, he scrolls through old texts on his now-defunct phone, wondering how likely it is that Alice implanted a tracker somewhere in his body while he slept. He wants to go to the South Side and check in with Toni and Sweet Pea and Fangs - he made decisions for them, for the group, for the Serpents, and now he’s not there to deal with the fallout. They put their trust in him, and now he’s abandoned them. 

(In the very back of his mind, he wonders: _is that what I did to Betty?_ ) 

He opens up his messaging history with Archie. The Andrews’ home is right next door; Jughead doesn’t need to cell phone or a bus ride to get in contact with his oldest friend. He could go over there and play video games and help Archie polish off leftover apple pie. 

Or, at the very least, he could have, once. He’s not sure if he can anymore. Things have been strange with Archie. His most recent texts, all from Christmas Day, begin with _merry christmas bro!_ The next text, from the evening, is _Ronnie and I are back together._ Jughead spent several minutes staring at that text - it seemed incomplete, somehow, like it was only half a sentence, like it should have also said _your turn to make things right with Betty._ The three little dots indicating that Archie was typing had appeared, disappeared, and reappeared again, and Jughead had waited for some version of that sentiment, but it never came; instead, Archie simply sent a happy-faced emoji. It unsettled him for reasons he can’t pinpoint, and now, he can’t shake the feeling that going next door would be strange, full of inexplicable tension-thick air. 

 

 

 

At quarter after four, Betty taps lightly on Polly’s bedroom door and swings it open a few inches. 

“I’m making Shepherd’s Pie for dinner,” she says. “Do you want to help?”

Jughead says yes. With her, the answer he always wants to give is _yes_. 

 

 

 

Betty gives him soft orders in the kitchen, telling him to preheat the oven, to chop this, to wash that. Jughead does as he’s told, sneaking glances over at her all the while. The radio, tuned to a news station, fills the silence between them. 

She’s dressed down, out of her usual uniform of jeans and collared shirts or blouses, wearing a pair of sweatpants that say _River_ on one ass cheek and _Vixens_ on the other and a blue-and-white baseball tee. In those clothes, she looks small, and Jughead is suddenly certain that she’s lost weight. He’s struck by the memory of sitting with her at Pop’s, the day after the shooting, digging into his food while her plate remained untouched and her brows creased with worry as she studied him. 

“Open the oven, please,” she says, and he does. Betty steps close enough to him that he could touch her, if he dared.

 

 

 

Late at night, he wakes to the feeling of the mattress being jostled as she crawls into bed next to him. He murmurs her name but she doesn’t reply, just settles in close, facing away from him. She pulls his arm around her; her fingers, as they wind through his, are shaking. 

“Another nightmare?” he asks softly, against her shoulder. 

“Yes,” she whispers, pressing her back against his chest. 

“It’s alright,” Jughead tells her, because it feels like the right thing to say, not because he thinks that it’s true. He feels her sigh, and her bare toes brush against his. 

He orders himself not to think about her body and each of its points of contact with his, the places their skin is touching, the curve of her ass pressed into his crotch, the skin of her neck just under his lips, her hair tickling his nose. 

He’s unsuccessful, and in spite of himself, he grows hard. He tries to keep his breathing very even, hoping that he might trick her into thinking he’s fallen asleep, but Betty turns around in his hold, and suddenly her eyes are burning into his, her mouth so close to his own. 

“You want to have sex with me,” she says. It’s not quite a question.

Jughead swallows thickly. “I - ”

“So do it,” Betty breathes, and before he even has a chance to process her words, she’s kissing him, sucking at his bottom lip, looping an arm around his shoulders and pressing her chest firmly against his, and he can feel the hard peaks of her nipples, she’s not wearing a bra - 

He puts a hand against her jaw, angling her mouth so that he can slip his tongue past her lips, and slowly, so slowly, he lets his hand drop, and he brushes his thumb very gently over one of her nipples, and right against his mouth, she makes a small sound, her leg lifting and hooking up over his hips, bringing them even closer, and Jughead can’t help his groan when he feels the warmth at the juncture of her legs. He’s possessed by a strange sort of confidence, a desperate sort of want, when the hand that’s cupping her breast drifts downward, further and further, until he’s cupping her over her pyjamas and panties instead. 

Betty gasps, breaking the kiss. Her eyes are wide as she looks at him, a little startled, almost scared. 

Jughead keeps his eyes locked with hers as he moves his hand away. He finds the hem of her shirt and lifts it upward, watching her face for a signal to stop. He doesn’t find one, so he keeps going until he’s exposed one of her breasts, and then he shifts downward on the bed and closes his mouth around her perfect pink nipple. He grazes it very gently with his teeth and Betty keens, her fingers sinking into his hair and gripping strands of it tightly. He sucks at her nipple and she gasps, “ _Juggie_.” 

“Shh,” he murmurs, skimming his mouth along the swells of her breasts before he lifts his head again and kisses her, as tender and inquisitive as the first time he ever kissed her in this house, the first time he ever kissed her at all. 

Betty’s hand cups his neck, slides down along his shoulder, reaches his chest - and then, abruptly, she pushes him away, sitting up and turning her back to him in one smooth movement, her legs dangling off the side of the bed as she yanks her shirt down, trying to straighten it out. 

“Betts,” he says, unable to keep the confusion out of his voice. He reaches toward her, but before his fingertips can brush against her spine, she says, her words sounding choked and raw, “I kissed Archie.” 

Jughead’s hand falls to the mattress with a soft but audible _thunk_. There is a sudden and terrible pain in his chest, like violently intensified heartburn. A nasty voice in his head says, _It was only a matter of time._

Aloud, after a moment of heavy silence, he manages to ask, “Why?” 

“I don’t know,” Betty whispers. It sounds like she’s crying. “I thought I could die. I thought he was the only one who could see that. I thought - I felt like he was the only one who saw. Who saw how hard I was - who saw that I - that I wanted to _fix_ \- that there was a way _back_ \- ”

A cracking sound comes out of her throat, and she gets up. Her footfalls are soft on Polly’s carpet as she runs back to her own room. 

Jughead stares at the ceiling until his vision is totally blurred. When he finally blinks, moisture slides down the sides of his face. 

 

 

 

Early the next day, when the winter sun is only just beginning to make its way into the sky, he walks into the bathroom while Betty’s getting ready. He’d heard her brushing her teeth; when he walks through the door, she’s just finished washing her face, and there is trepidation in her tired eyes when she glances toward him. 

“I kissed Toni,” he says. 

Hurt flashes over Betty’s face, a kind of hurt so acute that for a second Jughead feels nothing but sorry. “Oh,” she says very quietly, and with effort, manages to pull up a neutral expression. 

“I didn’t - ” There were words - coherent sentences - in his head before he came into this room, but now that he’s looking at her, they seem to have vanished. “It wasn’t - it was nothing like kissing you. Nothing’s ever been like kissing you, _no one’s_ ever been like you. Betty, you’re - ” 

She lowers her eyes to the floor. Her freshly-scrubbed cheeks are splotchy and pink. 

_You’re the only girl I’ve ever loved_ , he wants to say. _You’re the only girl, period._

Betty looks up at him again. 

He asks, in a tone he hopes does not betray the quivering sensation in his chest, “Do you want to kiss him again?” 

She exhales so sharply that it would almost sound like a laugh, were she smiling, but the look on her face is somewhat fraught. She shakes her head slowly. 

With a white-knuckled grip on the towel in her hands, she tells him, “No.” 

 

 

tbc.


End file.
